Longtime Halifax Chebucto MLA Howard Epstein announced Tuesday his name won’t be on the ballot in the next election.

There is just a handful of members from the party’s core group among the 18 MLAs who came within a whisker of power in 1998.

Whether by default or intent, it is Epstein who has been Premier Darrell Dexter’s chief in-house antagonist over the years, even before the NDP won power.

Epstein, though, is the only member of the ’98 group who never made it into cabinet and, in his usual blunt fashion, had admitted his own disappointment about that.

Dexter, deputy premier Frank Corbett, Finance Minister Maureen MacDonald, Municipal Affairs Minister John MacDonell, former cabinet heavyweight Bill Estabrooks — they were all part of that team, along with Epstein.

They were there to answer the bell under former leader Robert Chisholm, in the year when the surging party tied with the incumbent MacLellan Liberals in a historic election.

But the lieutenant-governor sided with the incumbents, and the NDP had to settle for a continued role as the official Opposition.

After the Tories leapfrogged over the NDP in 1999, that class of ’98 struggled along for a few years under the leadership of Helen MacDonald until the caucus pulled the plug on her support and forced a leadership race. Dexter won that race over MacDonell, who had just three MLAs in his camp — and one of them was Epstein.

Something apparently happened in that race, or shortly thereafter, that seemed to set Dexter and Epstein at odds for years to come.

Epstein, a lawyer, has always played his politics from the left, even in the NDP crowd. And he has been known to speak his mind, even when it didn’t dovetail with the party message. Happily off-message, that’s Howard.

He’s been a lone wolf at times, never afraid to nip at the heels of the pack. In 2001, sources told me it was Epstein who pushed hardest, behind the closed doors of caucus, to get rid of MacDonald in the belief she’d never lead the party to victory.

It turns out he was right. And the leader, who had just finished third in a byelection bid to win a seat in the House, was unwittingly refusing to accept the obvious in terms of her political longevity.

When Epstein first landed at Province House, he continued his mission from years on Halifax city council to see Halifax Water — then the Halifax Water Commission — gain control of the harbour cleanup project.

In Howard’s world, public was better than private.

That might explain a more recent example of Epstein’s hot water politics. As a party backbencher, he “outed” the price of the proposed public-private partnership convention centre after it was revealed during an NDP caucus briefing, a highly-charged issue that divided interests in the party.

Dexter, struggling to build party support to meet a deadline to acquire federal funding for the project, didn’t even fight back. Epstein was let off the hook for a so-called mistake in breaking caucus confidentiality.

As I said at the time, Howard is too smart to make that sort of “mistake.”

He’s been widely praised as a very strong constituency MLA. He is mostly charming to friends and foes but didn’t hesitate to tear a strip off the auditor general last year over a report Epstein deemed to be too political in criticizing government spending.

Frankly, Howard’s hardly one to talk, when it comes to being political.

Chebucto is probably considered one of the safer NDP seats in the province, but any loss of a sitting member does not strengthen the NDP hand when it comes to winning a second term. Now, along with Estabrooks, former finance minister Graham Steele and backbencher Michele Raymond, Epstein’s departure puts the NDP down four incumbents.

I don’t know whether Dexter is going to miss him or not. But when it comes to providing twists of entertainment in the roller-coaster world of Nova Scotia politics, some of us certainly will.